


A Ghost By Your Name

by TheRatsAreListening



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Ambiguous multi-directional shipping, Azula Redemption Arc 2020, Azula being a snarky exhausting jerk, F/F, Gen, I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH THAT THE TYZULA STUFF IS MINOR AND NOT THE POINT OF THIS WHATSOEVER, I am not going to compromise the actual recovery for the sake of making this a ship fic, I might even take that tag out if I discover I can't credibly write it in, Just assume everyone will show up at one point, They both have so much to work thru and you will be waiting a long ass time, and which then inspired 60 pages of additional writing, but this work has not been intentionally abandoned, dash of azula/katara which i wrote on accident, read the note for trigger warnings, the author is majorly depressed and currently not writing, writing dialogue for her is so fun, zuko being Best Boy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:42:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24041527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheRatsAreListening/pseuds/TheRatsAreListening
Summary: The war is over.If wheelchairs were thrones and straightjackets regal garments, Azula would be Fire Lord.
Relationships: All of them - Relationship, Azula & Iroh (Avatar), Azula & Katara (Avatar), Azula & Toph Beifong, Azula & Zuko (Avatar), Azula/Ty Lee (Avatar), Everyone interacts with everyone else in some capacity
Comments: 74
Kudos: 300





	1. Captive Audience

**Author's Note:**

> More [clown noises] from yours truly.
> 
> This is a fic set after the show, aware of but kinda ignoring the comics, centered on Azula's recovery 'cause they did my girl dirty. This is my best attempt to approach the topic SERIOUSLY.  
> I did not intend to post it as serialized fiction, I was going to put it up once I was done, because once it's posted it's harder to fix and edit things and I DESPISE retconning in my own work. I have, however, lost some of my motivation and desperately need my brain to make some Fucking Dopamine, so I figured it would be an idea to put some of it up and see what happens, because I already have like 40 pages of this written and another 30 plotted and I can't imagine it'll get to the point where I've posted the last thing I've written and everything grinds to a halt.  
> (Famous last words.)  
> This is inspired largely by my own experience with anxiety, PTSD, depression and paranoia.  
> Comment your heart out, ESPECIALLY if something I write affects you and you think talking to me is going to help you feel better. I don't mean for this to cause any harm.
> 
> Trigger warnings:
> 
> Depression  
> Suicidal ideation  
> Terrible ideas about mental health(care)  
> Straightjackets (temporary)  
> Violence (implied and described, physical and otherwise)  
> Potentially self harm but not as of yet  
> Psychosis and hallucinations (currently minor)  
> Themes of psychological and emotional abuse
> 
> My therapist has access to this now, wish me fuckin' luck, lads.
> 
> Also, minor edit in the first half of chapter 1 because something didn't sit right with me. This is why I don't like serialized fiction. When I'm done, catch me re-writing it to fix all the shit that bugs me now

“You know, for the longest time, I really thought I _hated_ you.”

Azula was torn between “The line is long, take a number,” and something about how there was no need to be dramatic. She sort of wanted to abandon both options in favor of some non-committal, dismissive gesture, but her restraints had her outvoted.

“Is everyone you know really so unwilling to listen to you whine about it that you had to come all the way out here and complain directly to me?” 

She looked down at the straightjacket, at the belts wrapping around her torso, keeping her arms immobile and her chest compressed to the point where she couldn’t draw a large enough breath to firebend, and regarded them with annoyance more than anything. They deserved a lot worse, but she could not _do_ worse, she could only _be_ worse. In situations like those, it was important, she had decided, to make the choices that she could feed on, rather than the choices that fed _on_ her. And she had gone through most of her options, anyway. She had been angry. She had been desperate. She had felt humiliated and subhuman and trapped, and she didn’t have the energy for any more of that, at least for the time being. The only reason she even bothered to react to them at all was so they wouldn’t make themselves at home, so they didn’t forget that they didn’t belong where they were, so _she_ didn’t forget.

“Well, don’t stop now! I’m a captive audience!”

Zuko made a noise in response to that like he had found it funny, but only against his own will and better judgement. Which was a fairly consistent description of how Azula got people to do things, so it suited her fine.

“I used to have to tell myself that you always lie, just to stay sane.”

“Seems like the sort of thing I do often enough that you wouldn’t need a reminder.”

“I was never as paranoid as you,” he said, by way of an explanation. “I was never as determined to live in a world that only made sense if everyone secretly hated me and would’ve turned on me at any moment as you were. The idea that I could trust you always felt a little like it should have been true. I wanted it to be. I betrayed Uncle over it.”

“I thought that was about Father and _your honor_ ,” she laughed.

“So did I.”

Zuko came to visit her once every week. She actually saw quite a lot more of him than that, but fortunately, most of it wasn’t in the context of formal visits, where he had to pretend to care, so she wasn’t counting those parts. No, she’d only had to put up with him pretending to care for the past one million Thursdays, and would presumably continue being subjected to it for the foreseeable future. To Azula, this had never stopped feeling _wrong_ . For one thing, she absolutely loathed being seen like this by anyone who had once rightfully been scared of her. For another, she could very easily tell that he _wanted_ something from these visits. She didn’t know what it was exactly. Maybe he hoped to make himself feel better. Maybe he hoped to make _her_ feel better. He was just about stupid enough for that to be the case. Maybe he wanted them to _bond_. The thought alone made her scoff. Either way, these visits felt a lot like Zuko was standing in the doorway, expecting to be handed something, and not only failing to notice that Azula’s hands were literally bound, but not realizing that if they hadn’t been, she might’ve been tempted to cut them off just to remove the possibility permanently.

Metaphorically, of course.

“It’s weird,” Zuko went on, “but you were _right_ , in Ba Sing Se. I restored my own honor. Not then, but eventually.”

“Here it comes...”

“He has no power over who I am now, or what I’m worth, or under _what circumstances_ I’m worth anything. And he shouldn’t have that power over you, either.”

Nothing. She wasn’t going to give him _anything._

“You were always stronger than me. If I could break free from it, so can you.”

“Ooh! Appealing to my pride to make me do something! Baby’s first manipulation tactic! At 17, but hey, it’s fine, some people are late bloomers.”

Zuko sighed, but then something happened that absolutely drove her up the wall: nothing. He didn’t seem angry, or frustrated, or fed up with her mockery or stubbornness. He seemed, if anything, a little sad, but other than that, she had completely failed to get a rise out of him so far.

“It took Uncle three years to get me to wrap my head around that. I don’t expect you to do it today. I didn’t wake up this morning thinking _‘Wait, I’ve got it, I know how to fix Azula!’_. I just need to know that you understand one thing.”

“That you’re desperate to make yourself feel like you didn’t destroy your own family? I understand.” 

He seemed to be trying to act as though he was ignoring that entirely, but she knew that it had hit.

“I’m not here to get in your head. I’m not trying to use you. I’m Fire Lord, Father’s in prison, and there’s nothing more to do on that front that I could possibly need to manipulate you into helping with. I’m trying to help _you_ , for once.”

“You know what would help?” She asked, her tone bitter and sharp. “Being able to move.”

He shook his head, almost like an apology. “Do you want to go outside?” He offered instead, and his tone was so gentle it made her _sick._

“What, so I can be seen like this? Haven’t you done enough?!”

“Fresh air’s good for you. I could make sure there’s no-one –”

“You’d better leave, Zuzu.”

He turned towards the door and took a few steps. Azula could almost taste her freedom from his exhausting presence, even as she knew it would only last a few minutes. But then he stopped. “Actually, I needed to talk to you about something.”

“Will you go if I start screaming?” She asked, sounding hopeful in a twisted sort of way. What surprised her was not the answer, but the fact that in a brief, unexpected moment of levity that was so uncharacteristic of him as of late, he made a _joke_ about it.

“If you did that, I’d have to come over there and hug you.”

“Setting me on fire will do.”

“If you had a broken leg, we would put it in a splint. If you were bleeding, we could get you stitched up and bandaged. But it’s your brain.”

“My brain is fine, thank you.”

“Oh, so the voices _hounding_ you about the throne went away! That’s great news! Why didn’t you just say anything?”

“I’m single-minded, not sick.”

“If it was just determination, you could keep it to yourself and trick me into letting you out of here.”

The moment his words connected, something snapped, and she threw herself at him, off the wheelchair, thrashing like a dog on a chain, eyes wild and on fire. If he didn’t _know_ better than to imply that she was defenseless and at their mercy, than to all but say it to her face, she would have to _teach_ him. She got immense satisfaction out of seeing him flinch, but half a second later, she realized that he had done nothing more. He hadn’t yelped, or even just gasped. He hadn’t left, he hadn’t called security, he hadn’t even backed away to let her hit the floor just out of reach of him.

He had caught her.

Something in her wanted her to sink her teeth into his arm and make him sorry that he had dared undermine her like that. And she had no intention to deny it.

“Ow!”

She could feel his muscles tense as he fought the impulse to push her away as hard as he could. Instead, he just sat her back into her chair, and went to massage the sore spot on his arm. He didn’t seem as upset or startled as she would’ve liked. It kind of just reminded her of when she’d push or kick him when they were kids and he would sulk about it. Or go cry to mother. And then she would scold Azula in _that tone_ , and nothing would change.

“What did you do that for? Did you want me to let you fall? Are you going to spin it into some crazy nonsense about how doing anything for anyone is a weakness?”

“Well, it’s not as fun if you expect it…”

“ _Good!_ ” He did seem angry now, but it wasn’t as satisfying as she had hoped. “This isn’t supposed to be fun. None of it. It’s just really, really sad. And exhausting. Aren’t you tired?”

“Me? No, I slept like a baby. This straight jacket is the peak of comfort.”

Zuko gave her a look like he was only now truly _understanding_ that she’d had to go to bed like that, even though he only trusted _himself_ to get her in and out of it, and he couldn't have forgotten that, before he had started unloading on her out of nowhere, the original purpose of his visit had been to help her take it off, which wasn't standard practice for this time of day and was mainly due to him not having been able to make it after her evening “therapy” session. He'd been too busy with a legal issue, or something. She hadn't really listened to his explanation.

She didn’t understand why he bothered at all. Not with the straightjacket; she obviously couldn’t be trusted for extended periods of time outside of the expertly fireproofed room she spent most of the day in, that made perfect sense. But why bother bringing her out at all, then? Whatever anyone had to say to her could be said from the other side of the metal door. She wondered if he was trying to make it feel more normal by having them spend time together, separated by nothing, or having her spend time in other rooms, as thought it wasn’t an absurd parody of freedom when he was also personally responsible for periodically reducing her to a useless artifact of her former glory, on a physical level, sometimes for hours at a time, for other people's convenience. Azula couldn’t criticize selfishness without being a hypocrite. But she could criticize a lack of self-awareness about it.

She held his gaze and wished the guilt would kill him.

“Look, it’s obvious to everyone that you’re not getting better. I figured if we just kept you in here until after the ceremony, that you’d finally get it through your head that it’s never going to happen. You’re not going to be Fire Lord. I guess I hoped you’d let go then. But you haven’t, and you won’t, and I don’t think you _can_. I don’t wanna leave you like this. There has to be something else.”

“Touching.”

“So I asked some friends to help.”

Azula rolled her head back as far as the backrest of the chair would let her and all but growled. 

“Ugh, just kill me. You could say I suffocated in my sleep because this thing won’t let me breathe. Who’s going to fight you on that?”

“I don’t want you dead.”

“Being Fire Lord _has_ changed you, after all! Suddenly, it’s all about what you want! I’m so proud.”

“You don’t want to die.”

“You’re not providing an abundance of options.”

“I would, if you ever let me finish a sentence! Katara’s agreed to pay you a visit.”

“The Water Tribe girl? Are all your friends going to take turns bombarding me with their sob stories? Is that it? Because I have absolutely no intention of letting anyone leave here feeling better.”

“She’s a healer. She’s only ever used it on physical wounds, but she says she’s willing to try and figure something out for you.”

“The only wound to heal is the one caused by your continued violent assault on my eardrums. The drill we used on the outer wall of Ba Sing Se has nothing on you.”

“She’ll be here tomorrow.”

* * *

“I can only assume, based on how carelessly you’re waving your hands around my head, that no-one has told you I bite.” 

The weight of the other presence was tipping the room off-balance. Azula found it insufferable to have to put up with it without being able to _see_ her. It was the polar opposite of her encounters with Ursa, and exactly as horrible. But there wasn’t anything she could do, and she wasn’t going to give anyone the satisfaction of complaining about it in a genuine way, as though it was an issue she needed fixed. She didn’t _need_ anything from these idiots, least of all what was being done to her right now. 

If she weren’t so busy being livid about it, she might’ve given in and admitted that it was, if nothing else, physically soothing. The water was cool, and it was doing away with a headache she had been having for so long that she’d sort of forgotten what it was like to live without one. She closed her eyes, just for a moment. The sole benefit of the fact that she couldn’t see Katara was that Katara couldn’t really see _her_ , either.

“Well, you just ruined your tactical advantage,” came the response, in a voice so calm and smooth that Azula could not tell with any significant amount of certainty whether or not she was being ridiculed, even with her heavy bias on the matter.

The water sloshed back and forth, gently, quietly, carrying its faint glow from one side of Azula’s peripheral vision to the other, and if she let it, it almost seemed to organize some of her more erratic, less comprehensible thoughts into neat little rows, like the patterns the movement of waves might carve into the sand below. But just like the sand, they only held that shape until something else came over them, which was always.

“You could drown me while you’re at it.”

Katara said nothing, but Azula could tell she had gotten a reaction just from the slight break in her rhythm, and she allowed herself a satisfied smile.

“No-one would know.” A pause. “Well, _everyone_ would know, but no-one would care.”

“People _would_ care, Azula.” That gentle, slightly sad tone again. It was like hearing her brother talk in a girl’s voice, and she was so fucking tired of it! Why did anyone think she needed their pity?! “Zuko would care.”

Ugh.

“That’s always been his problem. It’s a pointless endeavor. As his friend, I don’t understand why you _don’t_ want him to get over it.”

Silence. Had she won?

“You’re definitely not the easiest person in the world to care about—”

Alas, no.

“—but this is really important to him, I think he’d be so much worse off if anyone forced him to give it up. And it doesn’t have to be easy. Caring about Sokka isn’t easy and I’ll die before I stop.”

“No, really,” said Azula, like she hadn't heard any of that, precisely because she _had._ She had told Zuko something and she was going to keep her word. “This thing turns your lung capacity into a joke. And I can’t go anywhere –” and she wiggled a little, just to make a show of how effective her restraints were, “– I wouldn’t even be able to struggle much. You could stay where you are and not even have to look at me if you can’t handle it. Only takes a minute. Enough to sing about half of _‘Four seasons’_ , unless, like Uncle, you only know the chorus.”

“Azula, please.”

“Forgive me, I don’t know any Southern Water Tribe songs. On the bright side,” she went on, sounding so chipper that she even freaked herself out a little, “it’s only a guideline. All you really need to know is people are dead when they’ve stopped moving.”

“I’m not going to kill you. And I’m not going to leave just because you’ve decided to make it awful for me to be here. I would _like_ to be doing this for you, but if you’re not going to let me, then I’m going to do it for Zuko.”

“Fine!” She snapped, so abruptly that she could feel Katara flinch behind her. It was less that her frustration was seeping through the cracks in her facade of tranquility, and more like the facade of tranquility had crumbled like a burnt match. “I give up. What will it take? How much more of this until you finally understand that you’re wasting your time?!”

“If there’s a chance it’ll make any difference at all, then I’m not wasting anything.”

“But that hinges on _knowing_ you made a difference. If you can’t tell, you’ll feel pretty useless, no matter what you _say_.”

“Oh, I’ll know,” promised Katara, sounding infuriatingly like her conviction hadn’t been shaken at all by anything Azula had said. “No matter how determined you are to make this hard on us. You can’t hide getting better.”

Well, how was that fair? To take away her ability to physically cause harm, or even just defend herself, was one thing, but to make it so her efforts to keep people out of her head were redundant, empty, meaningless, that was just maddeningly unjust. To force her to be entirely at their mercy, and then refuse to have that mercy extend to the common courtesy of just killing her, how was she supposed to make her peace with that?

“Will you also know if you’re doing a terrible job?”

“Yeah,” came the slightly hesitant answer. “I have no idea what’s supposed to happen, because I’ve never done anything like this before, but I imagine it’d be very easy to tell.”

“Well, that’s encouraging.”

“How does it feel?”

_Like being crushed by the body of a snake that has given up swallowing me either too late, or too early, depending on your perspective._

_Like my voice is the only one I can hear._

_Like being reduced to nothing after having spent fifteen years being the most powerful fire-bender anyone had ever seen._

_Like my headache has gone away._

_Worse than death._

“Underwhelming.”

That didn’t seem to discourage her at all, but from what she had seen of this girl, Azula couldn’t really have expected it to.

“Does it hurt?”

“Oh, is that what you’re after?”

Another break in the rhythm.

“No! This should never, ever cause pain. It’s supposed to take it away. Especially because I can’t see what it’s doing, if it was hurting you at all, I would stop immediately.”

“Then it hurts,” declared Azula, after barely a moment of consideration, in a tone as even and flat as she could get it. She could fake pain. She could do it convincingly. She was a good liar, and a good actor, and she had sold numerous performances of overwhelming distress to everyone from her mother to her friends to total strangers. But for the little experiment she had decided she was running, being convincing would defeat the purpose.

It hardly took a second after the words were out for Katara to stop, guide all the water back into its container, and put her arms down. She was likely just about to start asking a series of questions to try and find out what had happened and how to fix it, but Azula had no interest in those, nor were they necessary.

“Huh. You actually meant that. Even though I was _clearly_ lying.”

The response came out like it was holding on to the end of a sigh, like the tail of a kite, or a trail of leaves settling down in the wake of a storm.

“It's not my place to decide if you’re lying or not. I’m not fighting you. No-one’s life depends on me trying to figure out if there’s truth in what you say anymore. It’s your pain, that I can’t see or feel. I have to take you at your word and that’s all there is to it.”

Azula liked to think that she was pretty difficult to catch by surprise. Between being a great judge of character and a strategic genius, nothing really got past her like that. _What about Mai and Ty Lee?_ It made her want to know how much of this morally spotless response was genuinely Katara’s belief and how much was a performance, a deliberate effort to give “the right answer”. So she pressed on. 

“And you weren’t even tempted to force me to push through it? On the grounds that it was most likely not true. Not even a little?”

“I was. But just because I _want_ to do something doesn’t make it right.”

“You must think that was so subtle…”

“Hey, if you caught it, you’re already more self-aware than any of us were hoping!”

There was nothing but silence for a moment. Katara had shifted slightly to where she could now see her perfectly well if she turned her head a little. This was much better. Interestingly, where quiet stretches with Zuko were leaden with expectations, Katara’s silence was just that. It felt empty. It had no demands to make. Azula closed her eyes for a moment, to block out the third presence that was beginning to feel more solid every minute, more real than even Azula herself, even though it wasn’t.

“It didn’t actually hurt.” She confessed.

“Do you want me to keep going?” Her blue eyes lit up with something between determination and hope, and the kind of spark, of _fire_ that Azula would never have expected in a water-bender. Seeing her like that, she could almost understand why Zuko had been hung up on her for a small eternity.

“Oh, don’t look so pleased…”

“Why not? You’re _letting me help_. It’s a big deal.”

It was absolutely _not_ beneath Azula, at this point in time, to take any chance, however small or stupid, to feel like she was in control, like they depended on _her_ , and not the other way around.

“You’re welcome.”


	2. Contradictions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The list of warnings will be comprehensive on the first chapter. Every chapter after that I'll just add the ones that apply, which is why some are missing here.
> 
> Trigger warnings:
> 
> Depression  
> Suicidal ideation  
> Terrible ideas about mental health(care)  
> Straightjackets (temporary)  
> Violent outbursts

“I won’t see her.” 

Azula had only slept very little, and when one of the nurses came up to the door to tell her she had a visitor, her answer shot out of her almost before she was sure what she was answering to. It wasn’t like she _could_ see her, anyway. Regular, not-the-Fire-Lord visitors weren’t allowed in or near the cells and she wasn’t going anywhere until Zuko came to stick her back inside the straightjacket. 

(It reminded her of a story she had heard their mother read to him one time, about a dragon moth caterpillar going through the forest swallowing corrupted spirits, purifying them and then releasing them as fireflies whenever it opened its mouth. In which the straight jacket was the caterpillar, and she would be the corrupted spirit. She could just about believe Zuko was naive enough to genuinely think it worked that way.) 

That told her that this had been an unannounced visit, so honestly, it was all Ty Lee’s fault. Unless she had planned it like this, had planned for Azula to have no choice in the matter, so she could just _pretend_ like she had tried to see her. Either way. Why should Azula _want_ that? She had no time for traitors. 

The air felt thick, and her body like it was only loosely strung together with spider silk, so the weight of every move pulled her apart a little, and she never broke, but nothing ever even came close to snapping back into place. She drank some tea from the cup that had been slipped through a rectangular slot in the door with the breakfast tray by someone wearing fireproof gloves, who had then promptly sealed the opening back up in a series of panicked-sounding moves. It didn’t help, even though it was jasmine.

Uncle Iroh was such a hack, she thought.

Why even tell her if she couldn’t really choose? Did they revel in reminding her just how little freedom she had?!

“We wanted to know,” the hesitant voice on the other side said, sounding like it was trying very hard not to point out what Azula had just noted for herself, “when you would like it rescheduled. So it could be planned ahead of time and handled appropriately.”

The nurse’s stupid head was blocking the dim light coming through the small glass pane in the solid metal door. It was at Azula’s eye-level, but she knew the other woman was taller. This had to be quite an unnatural position for her. It wasn’t just happenstance. She was hoping to catch sight of Azula, she was seeking eye contact, looking to learn _something_ from what she might see.

No.

Azula remained where she was, knees up to her chest, back against the wall, facing the far side window, hidden from the narrow peephole by the thickness of the doorframe.

“Did you not hear me? I _won’t_ see her. If you have a ledger to keep, then how about you just write it down as _never_.”

She didn’t realize she had gradually been raising her voice to the point where she was shouting until she could feel it ripple through the walls.

  
  


Normally, the prisoners of this facility were forced to attend all sorts of silly events in small groups, for socialization purposes, but even in his infinite stupidity, Zuko had understood that forcing her to be seen like this by anyone who didn’t absolutely have to would’ve inspired her to do terrible, terrible things, and so instead of that, she got to go outside with one of the nurses for an hour or two, when the garden was empty. That still meant he had to show up and stuff her back into the Cocoon of Shame, and unpleasant though that was, it was also quite fortunate, because she did need to talk to him, and she would’ve rather been stuck in there until her bones turned to dust than have to specifically ask for him for something as ridiculous as this. 

It was nice to have it both ways once in a while. 

She even had half a mind to do something with her hair — which was currently a disaster — but there were no ribbons available to her, for a reason which she suspected but didn’t understand. Not only was hanging not her style, but it was also kind of hard to pull off with a six-inch-long sliver of red silk. She just ran her fingers through it and waited on the edge of the bed until the door opened.

  
  


Zuko had the straightjacket and belts draped over one arm and looked disproportionately tired for the time of day that it was, but proportionately tired for an encounter with Azula. She offered him a smile, not quite as sweet as she could make it, just to stay on the safe side of inspiring too much suspicion. 

“Oh, don’t look so glum. I know I usually give you a run for your money, but I promise I’ll behave for once.”

“Uh-huh. What do you want?”

“For you to be happy?” She got up to walk towards him, still managing to look intimidating and composed even as she was mentally preparing to once again be reduced to slightly more than nothing for a while, and watched his body tense up just a little, as he still, after all this time, expected her to strike first and yet refused to do anything before he was proven right.

“I wish.” He pulled her wheelchair out from the corner of the room so he could sit her down in it once she was all swaddled up. With every second that went on, he seemed more and more surprised that she was actually letting him put this thing on her instead of making his life hell.

“So, Zuzu, I wanted to ask,” she dove in after a moment, and watched his body language shift into the non-verbal equivalent of _oh, there it is._ “Did you know anything about Ty Lee coming to visit?”

“She wrote ahead, but the letter arrived late and she arrived early, and I was busy, so it kind of got away from me. Did she come here?”

“Don’t try to make this sound like a normal conversation” she snapped, somewhat out of nowhere, “the guards already told you.”

“I thought that was what we were doing,” he said, stupidly.

“Well, it’s not. You know she was here, and you also know I told the nurses to send her away.”

“Okay, great, did you want to brag about how efficiently you sabotage your own friendships? Believe me, I noticed.”

“She’s _not_ my friend!” Azula all but spat. How presumptuous of Zuko to assume he understood the nature or scope of any of this, to impose onto her her his _utterly incompetent_ analysis of the situation, as if he knew anything about what Ty Lee had done to her other than that it had been instrumental in his winning the war. “She _betrayed_ me. You remember.” With that, she pulled away from him with a surprising amount of force as he was tightening the belts, enough to make him stumble forward, and as his own weight stopped resisting the momentum she had imparted, she felt the world tilt abruptly for a split-second, unable to move enough to regain her balance. 

The impact knocked the air out of her lungs. She rolled onto her side, squinting at the light, which wasn’t helping the ringing in her ears. Zuko knelt beside her so he could help her up, but as he reached for her, all she had to do was look at him for him to know that he would lose his fingers if he touched her.

“What did you get out of that?” he asked, a moment later, from a safe distance.

“Should I brace for impact, or are you only going to _metaphorically_ kick me while I’m down?” she laughed at him. She took another moment to catch her breath, and then she backed herself into the corner between the wall and the bedside table to get up on her own. 

He brought the chair to her and she sat down in it like she was doing him a favor. She could feel it in the air around him that he wanted to argue what Mai and Ty Lee had done couldn’t quite be described accurately by her word of choice, but he knew better. Or else, he had had enough of her for now.

“So what do you want me to do?” he asked, after a beat or two, in reference to something that had happened mere minutes ago, but already seemed to her like a conversation from another life.

She was silent for so long that he’d finished securing the straightjacket and was ready to turn it around and push it out the door by the time she spoke again.

“She can’t see me like this.”

“I thought she wasn’t seeing you at all.”

Azula inhaled slowly, and then took on a clear tone and highly polished cadence that were completely at odds with both her surroundings and everything that had just happened. She lived in the space between contradictions.

“Well, yes, but if we’re being rational, it’s objectively good for me to socialize. Currently, I don’t do that, because if anyone saw me like this, I would have to kill them, and then we’d go back to square one! And yes, it would be better to do this with someone I can actually trust, but if my choice is between idiots and traitors, I’ll take the traitors.” 

“So you… want to see Ty Lee,” he checked.

She held his gaze for a moment, as if she was trying to use his eyes to search inside his mind for any sign of a favorable response. A hint of weakness. Or a hint of empathy, if the two were indeed separate. When she found nothing, she hesitated for a moment, in search of her next move. 

The composed, put-together version of her wasn’t worthy of empathy and wasn’t tempting weakness. 

Fine. 

Let him see the truth then.

“I don’t care what you have to do.”

This surprised Zuko so much that he had to take a step back, as if seeing more of her at once might help him get a sense of what she was playing at, what was going on inside her head. His best guess, judging by his uncomfortable-looking expression and his apparent inability to string together any words for the time being, was probably that she was implying something horrible and inhumane. Which wasn’t entirely untrue. Anyway, hadn’t she pushed them all enough that something along those lines might become justifiable?

He was thinking. She could all but hear it. Which was an unfortunate _but_ , because she really would have enjoyed being slightly less in the dark than she was. She could feel a faint tremor in her hand even as the straightjacket pressed her arms against her body. Was she cold?

“Don’t let me rush you,” she said, in an effort to go back to hiding whatever she had just shown him that had made him look at her like _that_. When she heard herself, she could tell it had been less than successful. 

He fell quiet for ages, as he walked away from the door and sat down on her bed, which the wheelchair was facing, as if the weight of trying to decide what to say next was too great to allow him to do it standing up.

“I’ve actually been working on something,” he confessed, eventually. “Well, other people have. I just gave them an idea and asked them to do what they could.”

“What is it, a bunker so deep underground, so far away from the sun that I’d be unable to firebend even with a comet over my head?”

“Does everything you say have to be so awful?!” he snapped. She had not expected to strike a nerve so soon, and she found, to her immense surprise, that there was something kicking about in her lungs that felt suspiciously like guilt. Her words failed to reflect that, though. After all, there was still a chance she had just bruised a rib earlier.

“You mean that?” she asked, in the same tone one might use to respond to a compliment. ”I’m holding back, you know. I thought you’d notice.”

“Just _STOP!_ ” Zuko exploded, in a way she hadn’t seen since before everything had gone to shit. Since they were, for a single night, just a bunch of kids on the beach, burying their hearts in the sand. “You don’t have to do this _all_ the time! Do your best to bring out the worst in people, push them until they hurt you!”

 _But I’m not doing my best yet_ , she wanted to say. She didn’t say it.

“If you want to get hurt so bad, then do it _yourself_ ,” he went on, and she heard his voice break. “Stop trying to drag me into it. I’m doing _everything I can not to_ —”

Okay, that was enough. These spirals weren’t fun when she didn’t mean to trigger one.

“Zuko.”

“ _What!_ ”

“I got it. It’s _not_ a glorified coffin five miles underground and I need to stop projecting my nightmarish sense of justice on the world. Right?” 

“If only you could…”

“So what is it?”

“Bracelets?” It wasn’t a question, but it sounded like one, presumably because on its way out of his mouth, it had tripped and fallen into the uncertainty her response had stirred up, either with the almost soothing tone, or with how succinct and downright _reasonable_ it had been. Ah, she loved keeping people on their toes.

“Hardly my style of fashion accessory.”

“Yeah, I know,” he deadpanned, appearing to have recovered from the shock and anger in record time. “I did it like that specifically to piss you off.” He was mocking her, but she would allow it. He had to make himself feel better somehow, since she wasn’t going to be any help. “They should break up the flow of chi to your hands and feet. I’ve been meaning to add a necklace to that, ‘cause I’ve seen you spit fire once and it’s going to last me a lifetime.”

When she had said she didn’t care what he would have to do, she had one hundred percent believed that she was telling the truth. But she had imagined that they might snap her spine and leave her paralyzed, or cut off her hands, or something. Not take away such a huge part of who she was using a method that allowed them to keep pretending they hadn’t hurt her. As she was turning that over in her head, a thought occurred:

“Why bother? Is the Avatar too busy to repeat his little magic trick with Father? Or was that a fluke? It just feels like the more straight-forward, permanent solution. Unless you _want_ a constant reminder of my undoing attached to my body.”

Well. Not projecting her nightmares on the word had certainly not lasted very long. She just couldn’t imagine what other explanation there might be.

“Maybe,” he said, looking like he was trying not to scream, although she couldn’t understand why he would put in the effort to refrain, “I don’t _want_ it to be permanent. Maybe I believe I’m going to be able to let you take them off one day and not have to wonder if you’re going to kill me. Maybe I know what fire-bending means to you, or maybe I just don’t believe you _deserve_ to be treated like _him_. If I did, you’d be in prison, not here.”

“I’m only here because you think I’m crazy.”

“Then _prove me wrong._ ”

Oh, she had less than nothing to prove to him. But she could play along, for the time being. She looked down to where her hands would’ve been about ten minutes prior.

“How long?”

He shrugged, seeming relieved that he could at least pretend like this was over, for now. “They already work on me, but we have no clue how they’ll behave in the long-term, and I’m pretty sure you could break them if you tried hard enough.” 

“But you’re still going to give them to me.”

“I’m moving you back into the palace,” he said, an apparent non-sequitur. “You _will_ make me regret it, eventually, and I’m not putting anyone who works here between you and whatever you want.”

“Truly the wisest of the Fire Lords...”

“You’ll still be heavily guarded, but they’ll be soldiers. They at least stand a chance.”

“I figured you’d line the halls with water-benders prepared to douse me the second I open the door,” she said. She could see him deny himself the laughter.

“I only have one water-bender I could call in a favor from and she didn’t think that was funny when I said it, so it’s unlikely.”

She put on a show of childlike sadness with an exaggerated pout. “Poor Zuzu, can’t even make a girl laugh.”

“I’ll put Ty Lee up in a guest room,” he went on, tragically unaffected, “If she wants to wait around. I want her input on the chi blockers.” 

“Just in case betraying me once was so fun that she wants to have another go!” Azula exploded, in a jarringly cheerful tone.

“She’d be _helping you_. None of the people I have working on this know what they’re doing. It could kill you over time and I’d have no idea. She does.”

“Now, why would you tease me with that and then take it away? It’s just cruel.”

He sighed, but didn’t take the bait. Shame. “We’ll move you at the end of the week, and then you can see her on your own terms.” He got up, grabbed the handles of the wheelchair and pushed it out into the hallway, kicking the door closed behind him. “I’ll see you in three hours.” He passed her off to the waiting nurse, and then he was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Formatted differently than last time because I just can't with Ao3]
> 
> Guess I lied about this taking a while but I really AM tired of fighting the CSS and the next one really will be a minute because it's simply Not Done  
> 


	3. Matches

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for this chapter:
> 
> Depression, anxiety, paranoia and other comorbid things that are so vague I don't have words for them  
> Terrible ideas about mental health(care)  
> Psychosis and hallucinations (minor)
> 
> Please let me know if I'm forgetting anything

She didn’t know what she had expected. It somehow both was _and_ wasn’t _exactly_ this. The staff had changed. Most of the guards, too. She knew this instinctively. Subconsciously, and not because she had looked at them and failed to recognize anyone. She doubted she would have known their faces even if they had been exactly the same people who had worked there before everything had fallen apart, because she simply wasn’t the type to look. But the palace hadn’t changed. Not as much as she might have expected. Time had eroded no more of it than if it had been a mountain and the past year had been a strong wind.

And yet, it felt utterly _wrong_. Whatever comfort she was supposed to be deriving from being here was utterly absent. It had never been about the _place_ , although the luxuries of living in the palace had never sat wrong with her, exactly. It had been about the loyalty _towards her_ that it stood for. Had stood for. That was no longer the case.

And her room was the _worst_ offender.

She didn’t even process it at first. She watched Zuko open the heavy doors, and then he wheeled her in. He took her out of the straightjacket, but she didn’t even feel the need to use this new-found freedom to look around, because it was, down to the placement of her belongings on the vanity, exactly like she had left it. Although there was a notable absence of dust.

“You’ve had people clean in here,” she pointed out, at once entertained and confused by the fact that he would bother. Zuko did not take the bait, and she was, in a way, grateful for this. He might’ve pulled both of them into the water if he had. She kicked the wheelchair into the far corner and dropped into the armchair she had so long ago turned to face away from the mirror. “So where’s that technological marvel of yours that’s supposed to keep me under control?”

“Toph’s on her way.”

Zuko really _had_ dragged all of his friends into this.

She arrived only a few moments later, holding a small box loosely in one hand, walking with an understated but unshaken confidence. She was the entire philosophy of earth-bending in human form, and Azula had not expected anything less.

“Oh, sure, just _unwrap_ her without telling me! Totally no need for me to know that your _crazy sister who wants us dead_ is going to be completely free when I get here!” Toph threw her arms out dramatically, but Azula sensed no real fear in her childlike voice. She was being difficult for the sake of it. She could respect that. She even let herself laugh a little.

“It’s in her best interest not to do anything,” Zuko assured her, a little too loudly to have just been talking to Toph, and while his words didn’t add up to an apology, it was clear in his tone.

“You better hope she knows that, ‘cause I’m not gonna think twice about wrecking your fancy granite-floored hallway if I have to defend myself.”

Surprisingly, Azula found she didn’t mind listening to them bicker. It was funny, and definitely better entertainment than she’d had in months. For all their other flaws, all of Zuko’s friends had a sense of humor. She didn’t get it, though. What was he _doing_? Was he showing off? Making a point about just how many different people would do something just because he asked? In his mind, he was probably proving to her, right now, that her beliefs about the interplay of leadership and fear were wrong. She could only imagine that he felt very good about himself.

“You really could’ve done this on your own,” she pointed out to him.

“Nope!” Toph chimed in, in the tone of someone who just loved being right. 

She opened the box to reveal a tight coil of some sort of opaque, muted pink gemstone with veins of what seemed like gold running through it in very precise patterns, and Azula understood immediately. This contraption of Zuko’s was going to be a permanent attachment. She supposed it was fair. A clasp, or latch, or even a lock on these things would’ve been a major design flaw. The only surefire way to keep them on would be to make them solid, and that took someone who could bend both earth and metal. And apparently, crystal now.

She held a hand out, feeling oddly vulnerable leaving a part of her exposed and so far away from the rest of her body. Toph broke a piece off the thin coil and wrapped it almost skin-tight around her forearm, following the contour of her wrist rather than going for a perfectly round shape, and joining it seamlessly. She could immediately feel it _disconnect._ She could still feel it, the cold weight of the thing, the pressure in her fingertips as her fingers curled up and her nails pressed into the palm of her hand, but something was missing. Everything seemed distant and imprecise, like it was all happening underneath three pairs of leather gloves. She was so utterly overwhelmed and distracted by this sensation that she barely even noticed Toph moving to her other extremities, and only really came to when she heard her speak again.

“What?”

“I said, can you move your hair out of the way?”

“Move it yourself,” she shrugged, just to be contrary, even as she did appreciate not having her personal space violated quite so thoroughly. “I don’t bite.” 

The retort came to her in two voices:

“Yeah, you do.”

“You’re not _actually_ going to put a collar on me,” she frowned in Zuko’s direction. If her arms and legs felt so weird with these things on, she didn’t even want to _think_ about what it might do to her head.

“I’m not, Toph is.”

Azula caught the flash of a wide grin in the corner of her eye, in such stark contrast to the uncertainty Zuko was trying not to show, and she turned to look forward again. 

“Don’t make me wipe that off your face.”

Immediately, Toph’s entire body shifted into her earth-bending stance, but it was a deliberate and finely-tuned response, rather than a panicked reaction.

“Ready when you are.”

“Can we _not_ _!_ ” intervened Zuko, raising his voice a little. Despite the question-like _shape_ of what he had just said, it was very clear that there was only one acceptable answer.

“She started it!” objected Toph, holding her hands up as if to say she wasn’t doing anything.

Zuko let out a long-suffering sigh. “That’s what she does.”

 _It_ is _what I do!_ she thought, with a twang of something like pride. _Aren’t I just wonderful at it?_ She ran her fingers through her long, dark hair and twisted it, holding it up. 

“Get it over with.”

She was grateful when Toph made this one last restraint wider. Feeling like something was millimeters away from strangling her at all times would’ve driven her insane. She had also changed the shape of it, so instead of a thin band of uniform width hanging awkwardly off her, it followed the profile of her shoulders and collarbone. In any other context, it would’ve been downright comfortable, if not for the new and delightfully terrible feeling that the air she was breathing wasn’t making it all the way into her lungs.

Though there was always a chance that had nothing to do with this, and everything to do with everything else.

“All good?” Zuko wanted to know. She rolled her eyes. There were few things she hated more than how easy it was for him to convince himself he cared, and how hard it was for her to prove him wrong, despite her best efforts.

“Just great.”

“Still wanna fight me?” It wasn't really a question.

“Always.”

She got up, reveling in the nervousness she could feel emanating from Zuko, and tried to find her roots, but with those things on her ankles, she couldn’t really feel them. She took in a deep, even breath and reached within her mind, with an uncharacteristic lack of ambition, for the simplest form she knew, pulling her arm back and then propelling it forward, palm open, but even as she was aware that the desired outcome was _nothing_ , she still found it… destabilizing when no fire came out of her. She tried to light a single flame and keep it alive in the palm of her hand, but it just wouldn’t work, and the more she tried, the hotter she felt the bracelets get. 

If she poured more energy into it, more raw power, if she built it all into a single attack that only had to break through for the briefest of moments, it might work. But that left her with two undesirable outcomes. Either she’d find out that it _did_ , and then so would they, and the next iteration of these shackles would be built to prevent it, or she’d find out that it _didn’t_. She had no idea how she might cope with that. She could barely take being seen making a genuine effort with no results, when moments ago, firebending had come so naturally to her that she wouldn’t even have had to try. That was pretty much her limit.

With a groan and a sour expression carefully engineered to make it look like she had merely been inconvenienced by all this, she dropped back into her chair, drowning the panic rising in her chest in annoyance at her brother and his stupid friends. 

“Satisfied?”

“You owe me!” Toph called over her shoulder at Zuko, and then just left. Azula knew she had always been exactly this self-assured and it was nothing new, but in the current circumstances, she couldn’t help feeling the confidence and assertive nature with which she was watching this infuriating child walk through the door had been stolen, just now, from _her._

“Are you gonna be okay if I go now?” Zuko asked her when the doors had closed again. “I’ll come see you later, and if you need anything, you can send a guard for me, but I have to go do… Fire Lord stuff.” For a second there, she almost thought he might tell her what he was up to, but as part of his efforts to make her get over wanting the throne, he was probably going to do his best to hide the politics of it from her for as long as he could.

She waved him off. “Wouldn’t want to make the people wait.”

And then she was alone. For the first time in so long, on her own in this infuriatingly pristine place, this perfect fossil of the past that had the nerve to exist untouched by everything that had happened to her, as if in a completely separate reality, or another universe, in which her world hadn’t fallen apart and she hadn’t lost everything. She almost expected a different Azula, with her hair done up neatly and long nails sharpened to a perfect point, to let herself in, occupy this space that she owned in a way only someone in that specific state of being could, and, on her way to the mirror that could only reflect one of them at a time, walk right through her. Scatter her, like smoke, or like a fragile ghost, or like a bad dream.

The weight of the sealed double doors seemed perched directly on her chest, and as she tried to shove it off by breathing deeply enough, she realized she hated everything that surrounded her. The banner hanging above the bed, the carpet, the red curtains, the pattern on the walls, and how neat everything was. She had to close her eyes to stop seeing it. 

She sat like that for a while, searching for signs of life in the complete silence. Listening to the pacing and breathing of guards outside her door. Trying to reach through the far wall into the next room. Zuko had said Ty Lee would be in one of the guest rooms, if she agreed to stay. But they were in a completely separate wing of the palace. Way too far to even make guesses about.

She felt envy rise within her, and refused to look towards what it was pointing at. It implied an absence, a _need_ , or a _want_ , or some other form of scarcity simply not befitting someone of her status.

She must have dozed off at one point, because the next thing she knew, there was a knock at the door and only the faintest orange light coming through her window, below which two guards seemed ready to fall asleep on top of one another. She got up stiffly.

“What?”

Zuko took that as an invitation and let himself in. “Do you want to have dinner with me?” 

“ _You_ don’t want to have dinner with me.”

“Would you ever consider answering a yes or no question with yes or no?”

Absolutely not.

“What’s for dinner?”

“Roast duck with mango sauce.”

“You hate mangoes.”

“Yeah. They’re like orphaned peaches raised by a family of carrots and parsley roots. But you like them, for some reason.”

Had he really had this dish made just for her? What was he planning? “Who else is coming?” she demanded.

“Nobody. Toph left, Katara’s only here once every other week when you see her, unless something else happens, and Uncle and Ty Lee have already eaten. I was just busy.”

Ty Lee. So she _was_ here after all.

“Do the guards have to be there?”

“What, do you need them to spoon-feed you?”

“I could still kill you,” she pointed out to him, in a way that didn’t actually manage to sound anything like a threat, a development equally shocking to both of them.

“I know,” he nodded, and stepped aside so she could walk past him into the hallway.

It was strange, sitting at the long dinner table without their father towering over them from the far end. Azula almost thought Zuko should have been in that chair, but instead, he stood across from her on one of the long sides. 

“No knives,” she observed, looking down at the lonely fork on the folded napkin.

“It’s already cut up,” he shrugged. 

Could that have been one of the reasons behind his cuisine choice? Not having to give her something that might double as a weapon? She forcefully stabbed a piece of meat onto the sharpened prongs of her utensil so as to make a silent point about why that wasn’t as smart as he had hoped.

He looked up at her with an expression betraying a level of exhaustion that left him just about ready to fall asleep on this demonstration of resourceful hostility.

“Ruling the Fire Nation really is doing a number on you. You should let me have a go, while you rest.”

She had obviously meant it as a joke. It would’ve been too shallow, unsophisticated, transparent and cheap, not to mention downright shameful and desperate, as an honest attempt. But it was the sort of joke she made for the purpose of eroding his patience, just because she could. So when this discontinuous sound with the cadence of marbles falling down a flight of stairs tore out of him, she expected it to be an expression of some flavor of anger, but it quickly became apparent that he was _laughing._ Not just bitterly, either. And it went on for _so_ long that she lost all sense of what could _possibly_ have been so funny to him. 

“If I put you on the throne for twenty minutes while I go take a nap,” he went, eventually, wiping a tear from his burnt eye, “by the time I wake up, there’ll be a statue of you out in the garden, Fire Fountain City style.”

Well. Maybe that _was_ funny. True, too.

“And won’t you allow me that much?” she pushed, in a disingenuously pleading tone, elegantly lifting one hand so the pink and gold bracelet could catch the light. “It’s all the fire-bending I’m going to be doing for a while.”

“Actually, I was thinking of tearing it down.”

“I thought you were supposed to be a man of the people. They’re not going to like you erasing their history like that.”

He looked up, and for the first time in about a hundred lives, it seemed even to her that they were simply having a conversation, instead of him preaching at her.

“It’s not history, though. It’s propaganda.”

“Sure,” she shrugged. “You _could_ say that.” 

He seemed shocked that she would concede this point to him, like he expected her not to see anything about an immense, solid metal fire-breathing statue of her father that might deliberately and aggressively influence certain political leanings in people. And, well, maybe on some days, she wouldn’t have seen it. On some days, she might’ve argued that it wasn’t propaganda if it helped people see their leader as he truly was. So she had to give him credit for at least having a semi-accurate idea of her position on the topic. But what he was missing was the fact that she just didn’t think there was anything wrong with propaganda in the first place. People existed to serve their leader. Anything that encouraged them to do that was fair game.

She dragged a piece of meat through the viscous sauce and watched it reveal the intricate design of the plate as it carved a clean line into the glistening orange surface. The head of a phoenix and several flourishes emerged and then disappeared when the liquid pooled back over them, as if trying to hide them from sight.

“I thought you’d have thrown these out by now.”

Zuko wasn’t following.

“The plates.”

“Oh.” And then, with something like a smile: “Mom liked this set.” She tried, really tried to hold back a sound of annoyance, but it didn’t work. “Look, if you have a problem with it, I’ll just ask the staff to use a different one when they know you’re gonna be here.”

“I don’t have a problem with it,” she said. It was a cold, sharp, glass-like sound, standing on the edge of something. “I have a problem with the fact that you imagine that holding onto her things will bring her back, or make her love you enough not to have left you here.”

“You’re imagining what I’m imagining,” Zuko pointed out.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” she challenged him.

“Fine. You’re wrong. I don’t hold onto them because I want something. They remind me of her, and I just think good memories are important. You and I don’t have a lot of those.”

Azula was an expert _haver_ of things. If something could be owned, she _would_ own it. It was her nature as a royal, after all. But “positive memories of their mother” weren’t something she understood how anyone might reasonably possess. It made her wonder frequently if Zuko was lying about that, but she couldn’t quite grasp what he might stand to gain. On most days, she didn’t even care enough to notice, and on the days she did care, it would occur to her that she had slit her own throat with that knife ages ago. There wasn’t that much Zuko could get out of twisting it.

For a second, she considered if, perhaps, he just wanted to talk to her about it. That didn’t seem right. It was what his idiot friends were for.

“You sound like Uncle.”

“I wish you knew how much of a compliment that is.”

“It’s a compliment to compare you to someone who has no drive and values things of no importance?”

“It’s a compliment to compare me to someone who thinks being happy and kind is more important than being powerful.”

What a tragic fool, Azula thought. She held back from making the argument that people existed to serve _them_ , and not the other way around, which rendered kindness useless. True as it was, it never worked on him.

“Power lets you destroy the things that make you unhappy,” she said instead. Had this really just not occurred to him?

“Did it work for you?”

Azula didn’t answer. In her mind, she had already spawned a raging flame in her right hand and said something to the effect of “Let’s try it out”, but her body, perhaps thankfully, could no longer comply. And it would’ve taken too long to explain to him that true power, the only kind worth pursuing, required no-one to have power over _you_ , which meant that under Ozai, she had never known it, and she still didn’t. What did he know?

The rest of dinner went by without incident. Zuko even made numerous attempts at small talk, lest she perceive their current situation as one of conflict. She did, but she would still feel just the same if he had never spoken a word to her in all 17 years of his life. It was just the way things were between them.

She didn’t notice her plate emptying, or herself slow down in response, until he asked her if anything was wrong, and as she examined how she might want to answer that, she realized that her best excuse to be anywhere else but in the room she had just escaped was, quite frankly, running out. There was no doubt in her mind that she still had an absolute right to be wherever she wanted, within the palace, but she didn’t know what she might do if it turned out everything else felt as out of sync with reality as her own quarters. Not to mention there’d probably be guards everywhere. The thought of their presence throughout the palace, meant to temper her, to contain her, to compress her existence into the smallest possible space, was already making her skin crawl, and they weren’t even in the room.

Fire was an agent of change. Not the most unpredictable sort, sure. There were only so many ways something could burn. But still change, and Azula craved it.

“Do we have peaches?” she asked, sheltering the spark of the idea in her mind like a candle flame in a storm.

“Yeah, in the kitchens. I’ll have the servants bring— “

“I’ll go get one myself,” she cut him off, the usual sharp edge to her tone completely absent. As she got up and walked around him, she could _feel_ him debate whether to let her, whether to ruin the borderline decent moment they’d just had by calling the guards. She could almost hear the gears in his head turn as he weighed the risks.

“Please don’t scare the staff?” was what he settled for, just as her fingers curled around the door handle.

“Me? But I’m such a delight!”

She pushed through to the hallway, where some armored hunk tried to stop her before Zuko called for them to let her pass. She didn’t like not having the exact reason why he had decided to allow this pinned down, as the knowledge might’ve been useful if she needed to reliably get similar results, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her. How she got what she wanted didn’t matter. It only mattered that she did.

The halls had never seemed this vast before. This long. Between the missing statues symbolizing previous Fire Lords and the scratches on the floor that she remembered from when she was five, everything had changed, and nothing had.

When she entered the kitchen, the cooks didn’t even stop what they were doing to look up and salute her. One single boy, barely older than her, even acknowledged her presence as he busied himself with a steaming pot. Zuko had really let this place go to the dogs. Once she ruled…

_ You know that’s never going to happen. _

_You would say that. If you thought it might, you’d have cared a lot more how I might turn out. But then you’d have made me into Zuko, so I suppose I have to be grateful that you didn’t._

She didn't answer out loud, mainly because, in recent months, it had become clearer to her that it didn't actually appear to make a difference to what Ursa heard. It only made a difference to _everyone else_ , and in this context, it would have left her at a significant disadvantage if the kitchen staff were to spot her talking to herself. It was the kind of thing that she knew sometimes and not others, and it was already very obvious she was going to struggle to remember it later, but for the time being, if she could avoid giving them the upper hand, it would have to be enough.

“Are you here for your afternoon tea, Lord Zuko?” the boy asked, almost cordially, over the sound of dishes being washed.

“I suppose I _could_ take it to him,” she said, sharply, causing him to snap upright. “I’m feeling magnanimous.”

“Oh. Princess.”

“You don’t look very glad to see me, Whatever Your Name Is.”

“We merely didn’t expect you,” an older woman tried to cut in and save him. This didn’t sit right with her.

“Is this not my home?”

“Yes, Princess.”

“Then it follows that I can go wherever I please.”

“Yes. You’re right.” They had clearly expected her freedom to be greatly restricted, perhaps as Zuko had promised; she could see it in their eyes, but not one of them dared to say a word.

“Well, in that case, you should _always_ expect me,” she concluded, taking a moment to revel in the trepidatious atmosphere she had managed to create with so few words. She felt tempted to push further, but for some reason that she didn’t even want to consider might have been tangentially related to Zuko, didn’t.

“Is there anything we can do for you?” some man asked, once he had swallowed his heart back into its proper position between his lungs.

“Lucky for you, I’m only here for the Fire Lord’s tea and a box of matches. Oh. And a peach.”

“Matches?” the man queried. “The Fire Lord is a bender.”

The fact that they had been so quick to dismiss _her_ as one was somehow more enraging than having just witnessed someone object to her demand.

“Are you really going to make him come all this way and ask for them himself?”

This finally got things moving. For as much as Zuko had neglected to remind them that they should be afraid, it was not an instinct that went away, and she was particularly skilled at reawakening it. Moments later, she was walking down the hall with a silver tray, and a matchbook wedged tightly between her left bracelet and the underside of her wrist, hidden by the long sleeve of her tunic.

When she set the tray down, Zuko looked at her like she had grown another head and its hair was on fire. 

“What’s this?”

“This is me enabling the terrible habit you picked up from Uncle,” she said, as her most charming self, before lifting the small saucer with the sliced peach from where it was resting against the edge and sitting down quietly in front of her leftovers. For just a moment there, he looked like he might collapse face-first into his cup from the shock of it alone. He did try to hide it, but she was too good at this game.

“Thank you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hate nothing more than having to edit and post this thing. Nothing. I would pay a human person actual real money to do it for me. I was almost done and then i made some change that caused AO3 to add line breaks between everything??? UGH Also, the "book" setting in the CSS never fucking works i had to add spaces in front of everything by hand i hope every single one of you gets 20 years younger after drinking my blood.


	4. Smoke

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well! You just got one earlier than scheduled, but don't count on another for a while, I just really needed to be in this headspace.
> 
> You know the drill. This is not meant to do any harm. Talk to me if anything hurts.
> 
> Trigger warnings:
> 
> Depression  
> Self-harm (minor to arguably absent)  
> Bad ideas about mental health(care)  
> Violence (psychological and physical, implied and described)  
> Suicide reference (minor, implied)
> 
> Let me know what I forgot.

By the time they were leaving the dining hall, Zuko appeared to have somewhat recovered from the traumatic experience of having had Azula be nice to him. 

“You wanna go back to your room?” he asked, as if she was supposed not to have noticed that he was pretty much already steering her.

“Do we still have a library? Or did you burn all the books for being propaganda?”

He looked away from her for a second, and try as she might, she could not hide the hint of delighted outrage in her tone.

“Zuko!”

“Just a few…”

She let her head roll back, as if the distance to the ceiling might give her enough room to imagine that scene in full, glorious detail. “Really? Here I thought you were the type to think negative examples could still be learned from. You do have an exhausting tendency of turning everything into a lesson of some sort. I blame Uncle.”

“I’m not proud of it,” he shrugged. “I wasn’t in a good place.”

She had already been walking slower than normal, but at that, she stopped dead in her tracks and leaned against the wall to face him, arms crossed over her chest. It was hard to say what this was. An invitation? A challenge? A threat? The lines often got so blurred between the two of them that Azula wasn’t sure anybody would’ve known for certain. Neither of them did.

It was a truly fascinating position to be in, catching him out on something like this. Zuko had always been miles behind her in terms of skills. Judged by his ability to lead and plan and take risks and _win_ , he had always been a failure. But in some other twisted way, he had, for exactly that reason, always been _perfect_.

Azula wasn’t stupid. She knew very well that doing everything flawlessly, always, had led to her being treasured as an asset, but not _loved._ Their father’s appreciation had always been highly conditional, dependent on prodigious talent and extraordinary effort. She didn’t care. Being loved wasn’t worth her time. But it was somehow worth Zuko’s, and it came to him with ease. Like the turtle ducks. Like their mother running past her door to drive away his nightmares. It came to him like fire-bending came to her.

Well. That was no longer true.

She had always thought it was his weakness that invited love. It was not a price she would ever have chosen to pay. But her momentary lapses into powerlessness endeared her to no-one, which was a pretty significant hole in that theory. There was just _something about him_. She didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t either. So, to compensate, to make himself feel worthy of this thing he couldn’t understand receiving, he had molded himself in the image of the people inflicting it on him. His mother. His uncle. His ridiculous friends. Had adopted their view of the world, their morals and their arbitrary lines in the sand.

Succumbing to his anger long enough to voluntarily destroy something, and all but admitting to the fact that it had been his best effort to refrain from doing worse, seemed at odds with this. Seemed like a failure to pay the price of love, as established by the authority doling it out. So it felt like catching him in the middle of some major transgression. The satisfaction of it was likely apparent on her face. She couldn’t be bothered to hide it. Like a prowling panther, she stalked him across the jungle of words, waiting for him to trip on one so she could pounce. 

She could tell just by looking at him that he knew, but he didn’t seem as worried about it as she would’ve liked him to be.

“You didn’t have to stop at that,” she prodded him. “You’re the Fire Lord.”

“That doesn’t give me the right to do everything I want.”

“No, it really does. You’re restricting _yourself._ ”

He’d lost this one. She offered him a smile as a consolation prize.

“So tell me, Zuzu,” she cooed, her words slow and deliberate as she pinned him in place with her gaze, like a moth. “ _Who_ is it you want to set on fire?”

“Nobody!”

She wasn’t about to buy into that. The force of his reaction told her she was onto something. Beneath the pretense that he found her implication absurd and baseless, he was clearly trying to shrink away from the reality of it, repulsed by himself for ever indulging the thought. And maybe a little bit by her, too, for taking as much pleasure as she did in forcing him to face it.

“Oh, don’t lie. It does nothing for either of us. I don’t think you’d _do_ it. You don’t have the stomach for it. But you’d _like_ to. I’ll do it for you if you take these off me.” And she threw her left arm in his direction with an abrupt, dramatic gesture. She was fairly sure she saw him flinch.

“You don’t even know who it is,” he mumbled, like he sincerely believed that might deter her from this hypothetical.

“Moments ago, it was nobody!” she mocked him.

Nothing. The walls hummed, like they were drawing an endless breath. They made her overly-aware of just how shallow hers were.

“It’s Father, isn’t it?”

Something in him sounded almost relieved that she’d caught him, like he wanted to confess and this took away the responsibility of it.

“Yeah.”

“Go ahead,” she shrugged, only missing a single beat. Was she meant to be feeling something? There was nothing there.

“You’re not supposed to encourage this!”

“I’m not on the side you expected I’d be on, am I?” she poked.

“No, I pretty much always expect you to be on the side of committing horrible atrocities.”

She really hadn’t meant to laugh at that, but she didn’t appear to have a say in the matter. Even Zuko seemed startled by it at first, but moments later, the apprehension was replaced by something she couldn’t even identify. It was uncomfortably warm. Carried the sort of radiance that rendered it painful to look at. It made her feel off and unsteady.

“Stop doing that with your face.”

He shook his head, as if that might help reset his expression.

“Think about it,” she said, as if she expected him to seriously consider taking her up on the patricide offer. She didn’t know how she was being so casual about the idea of murdering the man who had been the sole source of structure and purpose of her entire life. Maybe that was exactly it.

It wasn’t going to go any further right now, though, so she took a deep breath, as though she was preparing to exert herself greatly, said “Thank you,” and took a left towards her new prison cell.

He hadn’t volunteered any additional information about Ty Lee, and she was still too bitter to ask, and so, much _nothing_ had been done about it.

Anyway, she had plans for the night.

The edges of the matchbox had pressed thin, narrow channels into the soft skin on the inside of her wrist, where flesh had yielded because stone and metal couldn’t. She stood in the middle of the room for a while, holding it between her thumb and middle finger, running her index along the rough side, listening to the sound as she contemplated what needed to _go._

She spent the next 20 minutes pulling down banners and curtains and drapes, rolling up bed sheets and carpet in the corner furthest away from the wardrobe. She tore at them with a slightly too sharp letter opener. Fire loved a loose frayed edge.

Then, she sat in front of the vanity, lit one forgotten scented candle, and watched it melt, apparently, and only apparently, devoid of the manic energy that had carried her this far. The wax was dark red, and it was supposed to smell like pomegranates. Azula hadn’t had a pomegranate in way too long to tell if it was accurate.

She willed the flame to flare up, or sway with anything but her breath, hoping that, if it could feed on something other than her, she might still be able to _convince_ it to obey her. It stood still and defiant, unaware that she should’ve been its entire world, no more moved by her presence than if she had been a crack in the mirror behind it. 

She put it out, vengefully, filled with a watery, turbulent bitterness that wove itself through her ribs and then pulled them in towards each other, and she poured the wax over the messy heap of fabrics.

She struck a match. 

It fell like a shooting star. It fell like a killing blow. It fell like a misplaced hope. It fell pretty much like any other burning match would, and it engulfed the world in light.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


She sat and watched it. A golden Fire Nation emblem was getting eaten bit by bit by its real life counterpart, and it spit out ash as it went. It stretched over everything with insatiable hunger, not relenting until there was nothing left to take from a particular piece. In some ways, it reminded her of herself.

She stuck her hand in it, just to see.

The end of an Agni Kai came when you managed to burn the other person. Killing them was just a bonus, if one felt so inclined. You achieved this by breaking their focus for long enough that they could no longer redirect the raw energy of your fire back through their body in a way that couldn’t hurt them. Alternatively, you did it by outputting so much of it that it would’ve been physically impossible.

Some fire-benders liked to practice this by holding red-hot coins or other such things. Azula had once put one in her mouth, to freak out Zuko and Ursa. It had worked.

Fire had never been able to hurt her before, but it was starting to learn how.

While she couldn’t concentrate enough energy into her extremities to produce a flame, she could still manipulate it, rearrange it somehow. Not as well as she would’ve been able to, say, last week. But it was still something.

It made her sick, having to settle for it. The turbid bitterness from earlier made its way in rivulets down her open palms, underneath the stone bracelets, and into the cuffs of her sleeves. The fire raged, and so did she.

It probably only took them minutes to realize smoke was pouring out the window, but she had lost all sense of time. Someone approached, and only lived to tell the tale because it was Zuko.

“How did you _do_ that!” he shouted, sounding equal parts angry, scared, remorseful, and disappointed in himself. And maybe a little impressed. It was quite a mix.

Pulling herself together to whatever degree was necessary so that he wouldn’t notice the state of her, she contemplated letting him think she had taken less than a day to render his contraption useless. She held his gaze, trying, with moderate success, to use his frustration and utterly misplaced sadness to fuel herself, like a defiant candle, and equally imprisoned by the things that kept her going. She could see him consider taking a step back, if not several. Could see him consider calling the guards in. And then, when she was satisfied with how stupid he was going to feel after, she revealed the box of matches.

“It was honestly ridiculously easy.”

This was probably going to be the one and only time he would ever look _happy_ that someone had set a chunk of the royal palace on fire. She held onto the image. It was hilarious, and she wished she could laugh.

“Why? There are easier ways to—” he glanced tentatively at the window and then averted his eyes, as if he’d just realized he shouldn’t be giving her ideas.

“Don’t be silly. I was just bored with the decor.”


	5. Ashes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:
> 
> Depression  
> Suicidal ideation (minor, background)  
> Dissociation/derealization/depersonalization (significant)  
> Terrible ideas about mental health(care)  
> Violence (implied and described, physical and otherwise)  
> Implied intent to self-harm (minor)  
> Psychosis and hallucinations  
> Themes of psychological and emotional abuse
> 
> Let me know what I forgot.

She had left the room after only being asked twice, which was about as compliant as anyone could hope for her to be. Now, they were both sitting in a pair of plush armchairs against a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. It had been decided that there was no need for her to be going around unsupervised while palace staff moved out her un-incinerated possessions. Perhaps the library had been on Zuko's mind because she had asked about it earlier, and had thus been the first solution to present itself. She was briefly content to have influenced him in some small way. 

She was openly playing with the matchbox, which he wisely hadn't tried to take from her yet. It felt… unbecoming, to be so attached to an object that had once been so inconsequential to her that she could've plausibly denied ever having seen one. It felt like giving up. But putting it down would’ve been _admitting_ that, which was simply worse.

“Be honest,” he sighed, and the words _That’s unlikely_ embroidered themselves onto her face with a needle-sharp smile. Embers and sparks and quivering flames were still lighting the world from behind her eyes. “Did you do it on purpose?”

“Hard to strike a match on accident,” she said, matter-of-factly, looking at the stylized image of a lizard on the front of the box and wondering what that had to do with anything.

“You know what I mean. You're going to have to sleep somewhere, and it's going to have to be a guest room, because anything else is just begging for another fire.”

“If I wanted to visit that wing, I could just _go_ , couldn’t I?”

“It’s a power play, for you.” They were both fully aware that making him explain her own tactics to her fell in the same category, and it made her almost happy to just sit there, with this distantly uncomfortable truth. “It doesn’t have to make sense, All it has to do is show me that you get what you want, when you want it, no matter what I do.”

“I never realized you thought of me so often. ”

There was a pause, and in the silence, she could feel him laboriously constructing his response in his head. Carefully picking his words so that he could demonstrate his understanding of what was happening in a way that didn't make it especially easy for her to twist, and then accuse him, say, of paranoia, or projecting, even as she knew he was right, just because she didn't want to grant him the luxury being sure of it. It had been a particularly difficult skill for him to pick up as a child, and it was fun to watch. 

But then, very briefly, there was a spark of courage, _nerve_ , even, and for the first time in recorded history, he denied her this game that they'd been playing: he pieced the sentence together in his mind, _'You make sure I can't afford not to think of you'_ , he let her see it behind his eyes, and then he let go of it entirely. Went on to the next thing as though the point he _would've_ made had already been agreed on and was beyond any debate. 

In short, he'd just stolen one of her favorite moves to play. 

There was a rare moment of acknowledgement between them. 

“I think I’m happy for Father to keep the ‘Shortest reign in Fire Nation History’ trophy”, he offered, instead, in such an unaffected tone that it made something inside her snap so violently, he _had_ to have heard it. 

“I wonder whose fault _that_ is,” she hissed.

“It’s _his,_ ” he said then, with the same kind of reluctance one feels towards a worn-out bridge, looking at her as though he couldn’t understand how they had _still_ not reached a consensus on this, even though she knew he did. 

  
  
  
  


The trouble with the mind was its web-like architecture. If you thought about two separate ideas for any amount of time, it was impossible to keep them from eventually connecting, no matter how distant they were from one-another. It was impossible to know one thing in one context, and not have that knowledge poison the pristine fiction that you kept sheltered from the world in the farthest corner of yourself. That was the main inconvenience, Azula felt, but didn’t _think_ , because she couldn’t understand it yet, of being brilliant.

The notion that the masses needed to be lied to a little bit, because reality in its raw form was too complex and turbulent, and the energy spent on comprehending it could’ve been better used elsewhere, was, one day, going to collide with a few others:

Firstly, the plain fact that it made no sense to then turn around and try and sell the _same_ fiction to Zuko, as if they didn’t both know what was going on.

Secondly, the pulsing shadow of the way in which trying to do that served to highlight the vascular system of the whole lie, like holding an egg up to a flame.

Thirdly, the disquieting knowledge that she couldn’t both revel in how cleverly-built it was, and then, in her own mind, in the same breath, turn to the system that had produced it as the axis of the whole universe, as the one objective truth of the world. 

Or, at least, she couldn't do that and then present herself as the epitome of logic and reason. Even if every single other living soul would be willing to go along with it (or, if unwilling, could be persuaded), once the illusion shattered, it would be ruined for _her_ , forever. And so much of her power came from simply _believing_ that she had it, that the world had been _built_ around her right to wield it, and that it was intrinsically, unquestionably hers, like the blood in her veins, that it was almost impossible to imagine herself _not_ coming apart like a loosely woven tapestry with a solid tug of that one thread. 

But all of those things, the vehement denial, the self-indulgent mythology, the ill-advised abandon with which one was happy to believe in the immortality of such fiction, the cowardice preventing one from facing a less convenient reality because one's entire self-concept was too fragile to withstand it, they had all, steadily, built her father up so that he could fall, and they would do the same to her if she let them. She couldn't allow herself to _know_ it yet, not really, but somewhere at the very edges of her, the awareness ebbed and flowed, eating away at her stubborn, practiced ignorance like the ocean lessens the shore, grain by meaningless grain of sand. 

One day, it would reach her, and she would have to decide whether to drown or not. 

Today, though, all she had to do was confuse and frustrate Zuko.

“I thought you might want to take credit for it,” she said, her tone abruptly different, and now laced with surprise. It was also slightly distant, though, like the words were all very far away, and she had to look for them on purpose.

He looked at her as though she had been gone awhile, but didn't point it out. Taking stock of herself, she could only second his assessment. Her body felt as though she hadn't been in it for a good few weeks. She took out and struck a match to remind herself that she still had fine motor skills, and wondered, so quietly that she almost missed it, which part of this was due to her restraints, which part was the infuriating _other_ at the periphery of her hearing, and which was just her general disposition. 

She traded her pursuit of an answer for the idle pleasure of watching the match burn, and glared accusingly at Zuko when the flame went out suddenly, just before it had gotten low enough to make a lasting impression. He pleaded guilty by saying nothing. 

“Alright, I'm a _little_ impressed with that.” she conceded, seconds or hours later. “I didn't even see you move.”

Something about him suggested that he wasn't convinced she would've seen an armadillo bear if it were to walk through the wall and over the lacquered table between them. She resented the implication, and the lace trim of pity all around it, but at least he wasn't suspecting her of having faked this little moment to get out of confessing to her supposed nefarious plot to gain access into the guest wing. She wasn't certain she could've feigned offence or denied it all suspiciously enough to make him unsure, and what was the point then? 

_ I don’t think that’s it, my love. You know, you’re allowed to just be glad that he sees that you’re struggling. He should. He’s your brother. It doesn’t all have to be some sort of strategic move. _

Ah. There it was. Pretty much on schedule.

“I think you need to shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything,” offered Zuko, defensively.

“Not you!” she shouted, shaking her head as though she were trying to get rid of something, such as, perhaps, a flock of very small carrion birds intent on pulling her apart. Her hair fell in her face, and she didn’t move to fix it, because then she would’ve had to see the way concern had flooded Zuko’s expression when her voice had cracked.

_ You don’t have to yell at him. You could just let him help. He would. He wants to. It would make both of you feel so much better.  _

“You’re doing this on purpose, then,” she concluded, her voice dripping venom as uncontrollably as a wound drips blood. “You’re making me look like I’m losing my mind,” she went on, sounding like the very notion was as insulting as it was baseless, “because you think that’ll force my hand and I’ll have to let him ‘help’ me. He wouldn’t _want_ me to get rid of you, though, because you get in my way. You make me weaker. That means I can’t win, and he likes it better when you’re here, anyway.”

“Azula.”

The pity. The disapproval. The _shame._

The light reflected in her eyes the way it might have off of the edge of a piece of broken glass. When she spoke, she sounded like she had cut herself on it.

“You don’t get to say my name like that anymore.”

“Azula!”

She whipped her head around so abruptly that it hurt.

“WHAT?”

“She’s not here.”

She laughed, and it was an angry, hopeless noise, shallow like her breathing.

“Of course not. I’m going crazy, haven’t you heard?”

“Hey.” Something about it tried to be soothing and failed. “It’s alright. You’re okay.”

“Am I, though? What part of this seems okay to you?” she asked, fighting for the ability to process what Zuko was saying over Ursa’s incessant babbling about family and love, two topics she was hardly an expert on. She couldn’t bear to think about how she must’ve sounded to him. What she must’ve looked like. “ _Oh, would you shut up? You don’t even leave me alone when you get your way! It’s always been like that. It’s always wrong, somehow, and you’re just never done lecturing me about everything!_ ”

Zuko had stood up. She was very distantly aware of it. The notion came into sharper focus when he reached out to touch her, and then, presumably, thought better of it and started speaking instead, from right next to her.

“You’re going to hurt yourself. Let’s go put those in cold water. Please.”

She had no idea what he was talking about, and it took an embarrassingly long time spent trying to follow his gaze to figure it out. He was looking at the bracelets, around which her skin had started turning a concerning shade of red. Possibly because she’d been trying to fire-bend the entire time, and they had steadily been heating up, though she had no memory of anything resembling a conscious decision. Even this connection would only be made later, as she obsessively spun this interaction around in her head, trying to turn it into something it wasn’t, something she could live with. Her hands were numb, and cold, and pale, and not hers.

She didn’t move, and when he lost all conviction that some reaction was coming, he tried again:

“If you let me touch you, I can—”

“Don’t.”

He took a whole two steps back and put both hands up, palms open, as if trying to pacify a scared animal, and she could barely take both of them thinking of her in that way.

“Okay. All I need you to do is come with me to the bathroom.”

In another life, someone like her, so much like her that they had been sitting in her chair a mere thirty minutes prior, would’ve taken the opportunity to be difficult, but stuck having to puppeteer her current self, they would quite possibly not have been able to remember where the bathroom even was, and _something_ was starting to hurt badly enough to be noticeable.

She got up, shakily. He tried to offer her a hand for support, and jumped a little at the noise she made to suggest that wasn’t going to end well. It would’ve startled her, too, but her body was just a little bit too far away.

Ursa followed her out of the room without moving, like the moon follows you through the trees at night, but seemed to have run out of unwelcome insights to share

Something was missing from the hallway. The walls, for one thing. Everything she wasn’t directly touching or looking at seemed to exist on the purely theoretical other side of an interminable fog. But something _else_ , too. Something that should’ve been there, and the absence of which had her on edge.

“Where are they?” she asked, and realized, when she heard herself, that she was expecting an ambush from this now unseen enemy.

“The guards? I sent them off. You—didn’t hear me.”

“You need to keep an eye on them.”

“They’re not going to do anything.” And then, in a measured, deliberate tone that would frustrate her to no end later, once she realized he had chosen his words specifically so that he could have her paranoia and cynical opinions on loyalty work in their favor: “I pay them too much. It’s just not lucrative to stab me.”

She would’ve loved to shut him out of the bathroom, fill the tub with hot water, and just sink to the bottom like a rock in a lake, but she was also, in the moment, dedicated to not finding out that she had outgrown it and could no longer lie all the way down. It just felt like it would’ve pulled her out of her body completely, and then someone was going to have to clean it up off the floor, and she couldn’t stand the thought of people touching it.

So she let him follow her inside, and he ran the water over her wrists for minutes and hours and centuries. Her sense of time dilated and contracted like some sort of diseased lung, and every now and then it would cough up something awful, like blood, or teeth, or a sharp awareness of how fast everything unravelled.

When she straightened back up, the tips of her hair fell back against her chest. They’d been sitting in water, floating about the half-full basin like so much ink, and she found the sensation of it soaking into the front of her tunic absolutely repulsive, but at least it felt a little bit like it was actually _her_ body, now.

Without saying anything, she turned the hot water on and let it run over her fingers for another while. 

“Is she still here?” he asked, eventually. 

Azula didn’t need to look to know. She could just tell. She could always just tell. It had used to be that she needed to see her, and so she had been rather glad that there were no reflective surfaces in her cell, but over time, Ursa had morphed from a flat image against silver foil into a massive weight, distorting physical space around her.

“No.”

“What do you do to make her leave?”

It sounded like he was trying to gather information on how to help without _telling_ her he planned on helping, because she wouldn’t have let him. She was frustrated with him, either in spite, or because of it.

“If I could _make_ her leave, we’d have much less of a problem,” she whispered, almost disgusted with how tired she sounded, but lacking the energy to take it all the way.

There was a beat of silence, as he, supposedly, filed that away as a stupid question with an obvious answer.

“I didn’t think the move would be so hard on you.”

She went over her hostile options. All of them were too much effort.

“What day is it?”

“Past midnight, so Sunday morning.”

“You ever wonder if you’re running your friendships?”

“All the time, why?”

She didn’t have it in herself to mock him for not following, because it even took _her_ a while to understand what she was saying.

“How many more of these trips do you think you can get out of them?”

“If you don’t want Katara to come next week, you could just say that. I'm sure she'd rather find out before she leaves.”

“I don’t think I could stand to see another person for the rest of my life.”

“Okay. But I never see you snap like this in the weeks she’s here.”

“You miss a lot of things, Zuko,” she said, quietly, and they both knew it was not quite as true as she wished it was. 

“Why are you so against people wanting to help you?” he asked. Sometimes, that kind of question was a firestarter. It sparked arguments on top of arguments, pretty much by design. But something in his tone put it out before it had had a chance to flare up. Usually, her determination to perceive something as a conflict was enough to reshape reality until it was pretty much the case anyway, but this time, it just didn’t cut it.

“They don’t want to help me. They want to help you. I’m just _how_ they do it. I don’t appreciate being a tool.”

“Is this what we’re gonna do for the rest of our lives? I’m going to keep telling you people really care about you, and you’re going to keep not believing me? Are we going to go deaf from old age and still have this argument from memory?”

He sounded tired, a little disheartened, even. But the image _was_ sort of funny, in its depressing absurdity. She thought about it for exactly long enough to ruin that.

“I’m not planning on living long enough to suffer observable decay,” she informed him. He looked at her hands over the edge of the sink.

“Is it bad?”

“Nowhere near as bad as your face.” It was equal parts fact, insult, and reassurance.

More silence. She turned the tap off, but didn’t move to wipe her hands or leave.

“Okay,” he said, eventually, with fresh resolve. “Say they don’t care about you. You’ve tried to kill every one of them at least once. I wouldn’t blame them. You even got two of us for real.”

“Katara keeps ruining my streak,” she chimed in, absently.

“Say they really only do this because they care about me. Do you _know_ how many problems I have? You’re not even most of them.” A more present Azula would’ve dramatically feigned offence, or made him regret challenging her. “Do you know how many issues they could help me solve if they just wanted to make my life easier? And they’d all take a lot less work than this. Even if they only care about me, doesn’t it say something that this is how they’re choosing to show that?”

“They don’t help you with anything else?” She glanced at him sideways, sounding incredulous. There was almost an edge of disapproval in her voice, towards the five-ish of them.

“Yeah, they d—that’s not the point!”

More silence. At this point, they had spent half of their lives in that bathroom.

“I don’t get it. You know I don’t. I’m not going to pretend I do.”

He sighed.

“You said, a while back, that I’m just trying to pretend I didn’t ruin everything. And you’re right. I am. But I’m not going to settle for pretending forever. I want it to be true, eventually. And you’re exactly the kind of person who could shape the entire world into what _you_ want it to be, by sheer force of will. You know how committed you have to be for it to work. I’m not clueless. I know you think that. I’m not naive. I’m just not willing to let it go.”

“Good luck with that. Past a certain point, it doesn’t matter how stubborn you are, reality just won’t budge. It’s easier to break things than fix them. It’s why it works for me,” she told the sink.

“I know. I still think I could use your help,” Zuko answered, ignorant to the fact that nobody was talking to him.

“You can’t seem to decide if I’m an ally or a prisoner.”

“I want you to be my ally. It’s not my fault you don’t. That’s my line in the sand as far as pretending goes. I’m not gonna put anyone’s life on the line.”

“Works better if you do,” she pointed out. “You die if it doesn’t, so you never have to worry about it again.”

“Sometimes, you don’t die. And then it messes you up.”

She looked over her shoulder, in the direction that wouldn’t have meant facing him.

“I think I’ve just lost my credibility, as far as arguing with you on that.”

Upon eventually leaving the bathroom, she discovered it had been Zuko’s en suite the entire time. She hadn’t processed that coming in. He walked her to the North wing, where all the guest rooms were, and opened the door to one. Some of the things from her old bedroom had already been moved. The vanity mirror was covered. She wondered when Zuko had had time to instruct anyone to do that. Then again, she had no concept of how long it had even been. He could’ve had plenty of time. He could’ve walked off and returned while she was standing there, with her hands in the sink. She didn’t think she would’ve noticed.

Light was streaming through the window. Birds were chirping outside. And now that she listened to it, the white noise in the back of her head was actually just the shuffle of staff downstairs. So it was at least early enough for breakfast. She felt something like guilt about keeping him up all night, but didn’t tell him that.

“There are no guards outside this door,” she eventually remembered, as though it was someone else’s observation that she had merely found scribbled down in a notebook somewhere.

“I’m pretending,” he announced, like it was two thirds of a joke, a call-back she almost missed. It was most definitely a guilt-driven choice, but she wasn’t about to ruin that for herself by pointing it out. “Don’t make it a problem?”

Given that there were still guards outside the window, which wouldn’t have been a worthwhile exit route if she could just roam the palace, she would later conclude that this was less of a containment system and more of a way to always have some loose idea of where she was. (So much for ‘heavily guarded’. Had that been a lie? Why had he bothered telling it?) Currently, though, the only conclusion she was capable of drawing was that she was absolutely _exhausted._

“Azula?”

“Oh, you’re not done.”

“I don’t know what she says. When you see her. But she’s been gone since we were kids. She doesn’t know anything about you.”

Azula harbored a distant, unpleasant suspicion, so formless and vague that it barely even qualified as a feeling, much less a thought, that one day, it would occur to her that Ursa knew about her exactly what _she_ knew about herself, and _that_ was precisely the problem.

She shut the doors on him, and listened as he walked away.  
  
  
  



	6. Lion Hawk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ao3 tells me 107 of you are subscribed to this but none of you are being terribly chatty in the comments. Can't a person go missing for six months without having their engagement rates tank?
> 
> I found a new, more time consuming way of formatting this that might keep the left margin indent from varying in width, tell me if it improves your experience by so much that it's worth taking 30 minutes to do it by hand.
> 
> Trigger Warnings:
> 
> Descriptions of bad psychiatric practices, inaccurate diagnosis, the works.  
> A metaphorical reference to a behavior that might put a gory image in your head, that is not deliberate self-harm and doesn't actually happen.  
> The usual background TWs that apply to the entire work, if you're here you know the drill.

Sitting in a chair with her back to someone, with fancy glowing water whooshing about behind her, was not exactly Azula’s idea of therapy, or, at the very least, was not the idea of therapy impressed upon her by her stint in that glorified prison Zuko called a hospital.

For one thing, Katara spoke very little, by comparison. She would ask if something or other hurt, or if the water was too cold. She would say goodbye when she left. Formalities, in essence. And if Azula baited her, she might quip back. Earlier on—Azula had no notion of just how many of these there had been. Maybe three. Maybe dozens. It felt like a bad idea to ask—she would respond with alarm and concern to her trademark cynicism, instinct which had dulled over time, as she had learned that it didn’t work. But there wasn’t much else. The ‘doctors’, meanwhile, would ramble endlessly, in a way that reminded her of the one summer when there had been a peacock in the palace gardens, before she’d killed it. (She couldn’t remember if it had been on accident or on purpose, but the latter seemed like a safe assumption.) They strutted about, showing off their purely theoretical knowledge, packaged in flashy terms, so, so very confident that they knew what was going on inside her head better than she did. She found that laughable and awfully self-important, even on the days when it wasn’t a particularly high bar to clear.

One of them in particular had developed an obsession with getting her to admit that she was wrong. Didn’t matter what about. In their heads, she “suffered from delusions of grandeur” (she had never understood that one; from experience, it was quite _pleasant_ to think highly of oneself), “delusions of persecution and victimhood” (which had made her want to kill him _so_ much more than before), antisocial tendencies, and paranoia. So it followed that any opinion or objection coming from her _had_ to be rooted in utterly unreasonable beliefs. They wanted to prove her wrong about her mother, about her father, about Zuko, about the nature of power, about the war and her role in it, about the taste of the cafeteria food, and about what day of the week it was.

At first, she had derived great joy from making them utterly terrified of her. A good portion of the staff had needed therapy themselves after interacting with her, and she was _proud_ of that. It was fun to imagine them being told by some bearded jerk with a superiority complex comparable to hers, that their fear of her was disproportionate and irrational. She found comfort in the certainty that he would have been wrong.

Well. In truth, that hadn’t really been the beginning. Only the ill-defined start of what she _remembered._ Allegedly, she had arrived in quite a state and they had kept her sedated for weeks, until they could be sure she was present enough not to try and dig through the wall with her bare hands.

From the first moment that she could recall having regained the ability to make a conscious choice, though, she had turned everything they did into ammunition. And they had done the same to her. In fairness, she _had_ started it. Probably. It was getting hard to tell. But over time, the game had begun to lose its appeal. She had grown too tired to be clever, too angry to be patient. It had gotten difficult to play the long con and get in people’s heads _slowly_. It had made her feel like less and less of herself, noticing all the things she couldn’t do anymore, so she had deliberately abandoned all subtlety, stopped talking to anyone unless she had to, and when she did, it was all just uncomplicated violence. About the only person whom it still paid to put some effort into tormenting had been Zuko, and it was as close to indulging his fantasy of them bonding as she had been willing to get.

She had made it a point to hide the worst of it from them. It hadn’t been hard. If she spent an entire three-hour session staring them down and saying nothing, they were very willing to believe that she was “being uncooperative” rather than trying to ignore a number of things that nobody else could see or hear. Even in that state, she wasn’t so far gone as to not realize that it would all get worse if they knew. She had only visibly lost control of it once, but fortunately, it had occurred to her, in a stroke of sheer brilliance, to help them convince themselves that she had made it all up because she’d thought it would be fun to scare them, which they had been glad to go along with, since it suited their idea of her so well.

Thinking back to their last conversation before the move, Azula had no idea how Zuko had acquired that information. He had thrown it in her face with such confidence, it couldn’t have been entirely new. She hadn’t thought to ask, at the time. It was quite possible the doctors had filled him in on the “lie” and he had somehow put two and two together on his own. But then, why hadn’t he said anything to them? The staff had certainly never acted as if they knew the truth. It was hard to choose what to feel: relief that he had kept her secret? anger at the notion that it had very likely been less of a deliberate choice to respect her wishes, and more a display of indifference?

It was a very weird position to hold, being both always right _and_ always wrong about everything.

  
  
  


“I might be able to help with those burns, if you want.”

That snapped her out of it, but she needed a moment to re-assess her surroundings and properly understand where she was. Slowly, it also settled in for her that the issue of what the doctors knew and what they would do about it wasn’t _currently_ affecting her life and didn’t need solving. She had been staring vacantly into space, picking idly at one of the bracelets with the tips of her nails, and Katara must’ve glanced over her shoulder. She had, mercifully, not asked about it, or about the related events that had caused the delay of their last session, which Azula now remembered as though they hadn’t even happened to _her_ , but Zuko had definitely told her something, and it killed Azula not to have at least a vague idea what it was that she knew.

She didn't so much _want_ the 'help' as she wanted to not have a permanent shadow of her current predicament stuck to her skin for the rest of her life, if she ever got to take the real deal off. She would've liked to have said something like 'I'll allow it', in a crisp tone, with her shoulders pulled back, but it felt like a bit of an ask to make herself sound so composed, and anyway, of all of them, the interactions with Katara somehow still felt the least like pulling teeth. Maybe she had earned something less confrontational. 

“Alright.”

She then had to spend the next few minutes looking at her hands, engulfed in water past the wrist, and trying _not_ to look at Katara. This had not at _all_ been what she'd imagined people kneeling in front of her would look or feel like. There was none of the reverence, none of the permanence, none of the power or fear. It was a purposeful act with no hidden ambitions. 

“You could've pulled up a chair.” 

“Don’t need it.”

It was a straightforward matter. To her, the position they were currently in simply didn't carry enough symbolic meaning to be worth the motions of avoidance. To go through those motions anyway would've been to give it that power. By just being willing to do it, she reduced it to nothing. Their current circumstances granted Azula no right to revoke that verdict, so there it stood. Final. 

  
  


“Explain it to me again.”

“Hm?” She looked up from her work, and Azula had to consciously choose not to flinch. 

“Why you agreed to this. It makes no sense.” 

“Then why am I explaining it again?” The words came together into a meaning somewhat divorced from the actual sentence they had formed. They were a challenge of her premise. _If it didn't make sense, if it could never make sense, you wouldn't waste your time with it,_ was the subtext, and she resented the implication that she _did_ want there to be a sound logic to it, a way for her to reach _their_ conclusion on _her_ terms. Absolutely loathed the truth of it. Any direct answer would be an admission of something or other. For that exact reason, Katara probably wasn't holding out hope for one. 

There was no move left to play. No maneuver to restore the power balance. Nothing to do or say to regain the upper hand. Not even the classic disturbing remark, because Katara had gotten good at not letting it get to her _alarmingly quickly_. The unfairness of it made her want to strangle something, and her nails dug into her palms below the water. Katara spotted it, because of course she did. 

“Did that hurt?” 

“No, it didn't _hurt_!” she snapped, as though this was some sort of failing on Katara's part. “Just start over.” 

“You never believe a word of it!” Very mild exasperation. Nothing personal enough to serve as kindling for rage. “It's like you're afraid of it, like the world would be worse if it was true.”

And it would have been. It would have been worse if people cared. It would have been worse if they were making a genuine effort. Because that would've meant that she had spent her _entire_ life being devastatingly wrong about a fundamental aspect of the world. It would've meant that she could trust even less of her judgement than she’d thought, against a pre-existing background of constant decay. It would've been too much for nearly anyone, and it seemed almost like their inability to see it was a practiced skill. 

“I'm not afraid of it,” she spat, more angry than offended, and her sudden reaction caught the edge of Katara's combat reflex like light playing off a polished blade. “It just doesn't add up.” 

“And your world view does?” 

It did, actually, but she would’ve rather had broken glass in her mouth than the words it took to say it.

She went over it in her head again, just to make sure.

People were afraid of her, because she was worth fearing. Because she was more powerful than they were, more dangerous than they were, more willing to risk her life over something she wanted than they were (and also fairly willing to risk theirs for them). Because she had fewer pointless attachments to hold her back than they did, and much less to lose. Because she didn’t care about anyone or anything.

And so, she was incredibly difficult to love. That was alright, because at any point, someone who loved you was likely to discover that they feared _someone else_ more. She would rather be the thing to be feared. It was simply safer to have no-one behind you in this metaphorical chain. In the literal sense, too, though. She had learned that one the hard way.

And now, just because the war was over, they expected her to believe she wasn’t living in the same world that had sparked the first one? That something had fundamentally changed? That compassion was suddenly the law of the land, the main form of currency, a resource to be shared freely, and that _just about anyone_ would be willing to extend it to her, if she took the first step?

One step was all it took to fall into a trap, and the whole world had been a minefield her entire life. It simply didn’t make logical sense to be asked to _first_ make the choice to believe things had changed, and _then_ wait for proof of it, now that you were acting like someone worh proving it to. Only an idiot would sign that contract.

“Would you believe it?” she asked instead, simply, having weighed her options. “How much time did you need to come around to the idea that the Fire Nation wasn't all monsters? What did it take for you to trust Zuko? You believe in the things you have _reason_ to believe in.”

“...You’re right,” Katara said, and Azula had to shake her head—hopefully imperceptibly—to get rid of the sudden spike of embarrassment she felt at the realization that she’d been holding her breath. They looked at each other, both uncharacteristically lost.

“I’m surprised it didn’t kill you to say that.”

It was hard to describe what it felt like, when Katara did… whatever this was. With the water swirling around and under and through the bracelets, it was almost as if they weren’t even there. Like her hands were actually attached to her arms, instead of a million miles away. Like it carried the chi in the rest of her body across the gap, the same way it would’ve done for, say, electricity. Fitting.

“Isn’t this proof, though? Don’t all the things we’re doing for you matter?” She seemed maybe a little hurt by the implication. It was abundantly clear that she valued her willingness to work hard and the positive impact of that work on others particularly highly, and Azula tried to hold onto that for later.

“Imagine a world in which the Agni Kai took a different turn,” she said, and could instantly tell that Katara suspected this little setup served to enable a particularly cruel punchline. Well. She wasn’t _completely_ wrong. “Imagine you did take me down, but couldn’t save Zuko. He’s a pile of ash in an ornate glass urn, but _I’m_ still here. In that world, are you still doing this?”

There was something _entirely_ else in Katara’s eyes now. An uncomfortable awareness of something bitter and unkind that was part of both of them and belonged to neither.

“I don’t expect it to be different.” She wasn’t stupid enough to be outraged by having to reap what she had sown. It was merely unfortunate (and by unfortunate, someone more honest with themselves might’ve meant _devastating_ ) to have been so dramatically wrong in her expectations. World domination and crushing defeat looked ridiculously similar before they sprouted. It just didn’t help, and it felt like she was going in circles about this twenty times a day, that they got to lie to her with such conviction that they believed it themselves, because it was a luxury that she had _lost_. “So neither should you.”

Katara got up, put the water away, and took a few steps back.

“How does it feel?” she asked, and looking at her, Azula understood something she wasn’t quite ready to put into words yet.

“Like nothing ever happened,” she answered, with a flourish.

“I’m serious.”

“Have you ever tried these on?” Azula rolled her eyes. “I can’t feel it much. Which seems like it should count in your favor.”

“Zuko would want nothing more than to take them off you, if we could trust you not to be a threat.”

“That’s not going to happen.” 

Azula got up, too. It didn’t feel right to be the only one sitting. People looming over her tended to get on her nerves. She walked over to the still-covered vanity, the location of which had the advantage of letting her track Katara out of the corner of her eye, while technically facing away. To sell the illusion of unrelated motive, she started searching through the drawers for an undetermined object.

“Then there’s nothing anyone can do for you!”

That caught her off-guard, and it took her a second to recognize what she was feeling as the suspicion that she had been misunderstood.

“For once, it was not a threat,” she magnanimously clarified.

Katara shot her an expectant look that she could _feel_ more than see.

“Have you ever been to the circus? Seen where they keep the animals between shows?”

“Entertainment isn’t exactly a booming industry right now.”

She had found a file and was sharpening her nails back to a point. There was something in the repeated motion that helped her align her thoughts just a touch, but she had noticed they were not in as much disarray as usual.

“We have our own in-house performer, I’m told. I haven’t run into her, personally, so I can’t verify, and she appears to have switched professions, but I’m sure she has a number of thrilling stories to tell, and might even put on a little show for you promise not to set anything on fire.”

“Is that what you did? She never says.”

Azula filed the implication that they were on speaking terms and Katara had _asked_ under things to revisit at a later date. 

“My point is, the lion hawk is chained because it’s dangerous. _And_ it’s dangerous because it’s chained. The cage, the cracking whip, they’re part of a story that tells and re-tells itself. The show feels like more of a risk than it would if the animals got to walk around, even the ones that are disinclined to be violent, like elephants, because that would speak to how tame they actually have to be in order for performers to work with them. Not completely. Not even mostly. But enough that it would be nowhere near as interesting if you knew. 

“The problem with the story is you can’t stop telling it once you start. People can never get themselves to believe that they won’t be torn to shreds long enough to open the latch. Their fears are _deliberately built_ so as to be easy to justify, and very hard to disprove.”

Oh, she had _missed_ the monologues. There weren’t a lot of those left in her these days, which was regrettable, because she was just re-discovering them as yet another way to gain a comfortable amount of power in an interaction. She had let herself forget that she was difficult to choose _not_ to listen to. It made her want to turn around and make a show of it, so she did, but Katara managed to ruin everything by looking at her the way Zuko did, as if to say _‘How I wish you could apply this where it’s convenient for me.’_

She wasn’t feeling that cooperative.

“You’re never going to be able to convince yourselves I wouldn’t be a threat without this. It’s meant to justify itself, and you’re going to hold onto that, because it’s safer.” Her tone changed abruptly from performative to bitter and slightly sharp as the realization struck. “The only way to know would be to take them off. You won’t. I wouldn’t. If you could stop _lying_ to me about it, we wouldn’t have to keep doing this! It’s almost like you enjoy it. I thought I was the sadistic one.”

“I wouldn’t qualify trying to help as sadistic,” countered Katara, surprisingly _not_ taking the opportunity to remind her that the way things were was entirely her fault.

Hadn’t they had this conversation before?

“I honestly don’t understand where your faith in the process comes from.”

Katara was smiling. Just barely, like she was actively trying not to, but she was. It filled Azula with the sudden urge to check her surroundings and re-evaluate her strategy, to see where she had messed up. And then it re-occurred to her that this was not a combat situation.

“What is it?” It felt awfully vulnerable, having to ask. She should know. This time last year, she would’ve known.

Katara must’ve caught a hint of improperly suppressed panic in her tone, because she reset her expression to something neutral, to the best of her ability, and held both of her hands up.

“Nothing. It’s just that the way Zuko talks about you, you’re sort of… out of it, a lot of the time. And then I do this for an hour, and suddenly, you’re monologuing at me, and I can follow along.”

“Sample selection bias,” Azula offered, dismissively. “If Zuko has a hard time keeping up with what I say, that sounds more like his problem than mine. Maybe you should do some of this to him.” She wiggled a finger, in a pejorative imitation of Katara’s performance. “I’m never _out of it_ ,” she went on, mocking the very thought of it, as if that would help disprove it in any way. “You people are just exhausting.”

“If I should do some of this to him,” Katara echoed, mimicking her gesture, “then you’re admitting it works.”

“Get out.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me about this somewhere with a private messaging system. I'm isitqueertho on tumblr.


End file.
